this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
36 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43807 readers
871 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As someone who makes minimum wage from my intellectual property, the IP laws (in the UK) have allowed me to prevent the very wealthy just taking my ideas and profiting from them.
And they have tried repeatedly.
It isn't the law, but the corruption of the law that's at issue. However, without that legal framework there would be no financial incentive for anyone but the wealthy to make IP.
Is that what you want? Entertainment by big corporations only, and art made solely by the upper middle classes?
People already make memes and mods for free. Humans are a social species and will continue to create and share things until the end of time. Making money off of creation is a privilege for only a tiny few.
I see you make art. What if I said to you, I'd like to give you some money for that art, for maybe a print of it. Not just so that I can own some but because I want to support you.
And then someone just copies your art and gives it to me free. You get no money for it.
Are you genuinely OK with that? Are you saying that everything you make is copyright free?
I do not make art, I just post it here on lemmy. I'd be OK with that. People freely create, copy, and iterate on memes, and they are the greatest cultural touchstones we have. First and foremost, people create because they have something to say.
I'm sure astronauts love their work too, but they still get paid. Artistic endeavours cannot be reserved solely for the idle rich.
Art isn't work, it's speech. It's part of the human condition. Art is useless, said Wilde. Art is for art’s sake—that is, for beauty’s sake.
Art, as the old adage goes, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. It certainly is work, if you've ever sculpted an eight foot block of marble, or memorised one of Beethoven's piano sonatas. And it doesn't leave much time for paying the rent. The question is whether we compensate people for art, such that they can keep doing it. Does society invest in it, so that people of limited means can participate and have their voices heard? This debate has existed for thousands of years.